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Posts clarifying the relationship of Christian scripture and teaching to the evolution of Human Nature.

Discovering Love in a Secular World

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My public authorship was initiated after rereading the Bible from the perspective of the angels. This has led me into deep philosophical and theological waters – “ever deepening”, naturally.

Having made a conscious decision to attempt to ground myself in human experience, I found myself at a spirituality book store in Santa Monica. That day, I found two books calling to me: Sera Beak’s Red, Hot and Holy, the subject of several blog posts at the end of last month. While that itself became pretty cosmic, Sera’s honest celebration of sex has helped me to ground myself physically.

The second book was Spickard and Cragg’s A Global History of Christians. I must admit to feeling a little let down by the book. The subtitle reads “How Everyday Believers Experienced Their World.” From that, I was expecting something along the lines of Tolstoy’s experience. Having become disillusioned with sophisticated Russian society, Tolstoy retired to his country estate, where he awakened to faith not through the erudite ministry of the priests, but in seeing how the peasants drew upon Christian teaching to build relationships grounded in decency.

Two hundred pages in, however, it is pretty obvious that the book’s title should have been A Global History of Churches. The book focuses on the dissemination and transformation of institutions and dogmas. In the sense that Christianity was the foundation of Europe’s social contract from 500 to 1900 or so, the title may be forgiven. The way that people saw themselves in relation to their neighbors and government was largely determined by their Church. But the book does not actually delve into the details of their lives to reveal how Christians differed from non-Christians in their behaviors, nor how their behavior was influenced by the evolution of Church teaching.

The book does chart the role of theology in the formation of ideas of the self, mostly through the reflections of theologians concerned with the problem of sin. This leaves a huge psychological gap. I found myself, when considering the appeal of Christianity as an adult, to be profoundly moved by the idea of a God that did not demand sacrifice from worshippers, but rather remembrance for the sacrifice of a brother made in honor of a loving Father. How did this idea impact those living under the rule of Roman patriarchal impunity? I have this strong prejudice that Jesus’s example should have caused many to question and seek to improve unfulfilling relationships, and was hoping to discover answers to this and related questions in the historical survey.

The focus on redemption leads to a different set of questions, with a somewhat narcissistic tone. How do I achieve salvation? What causes me to sin? The common (anthropocentric) reading of the Garden of Eden is ultimately revealed as a caricature of human nature. We were not created in grace to fall into sin. We represent an evolutionary waypoint in a long and difficult process. Perhaps secularism – rejecting the baggage of institutional dogma – was required as a precondition for illumination of that process. Even if not necessary, we are yet today as Christians operating in a world that is preconditioned by the challenges of secularity – the idea that humanity can (or must at least try to) manage itself without recourse to God.

I must admit to being grateful for the historical background that makes apparent the extent of this dilemma. Stripping away the Biblical idea that we are defined by the necessity to achieve redemption from a fallen state, what does it mean to be human? The authors present four modern answers to this problem: Darwin, who held that we are the product of natural competitive forces experienced by all living creatures; Marx, who recognized that culture has created an entirely artificial competitive environment that is propagated not through genetics but social indoctrination; Freud, who identified the enormous challenge of raising our indoctrination from the depths of our subconscious into the light of rational analysis; and the existential philosophers led by Sartre, who championed the goal and practices of self-realization. In its full expression, then, secularism adopts the posture that to be human is to struggle for self-identity against the resistance of other wills.

The Christian response to these thinkers is characterized with reference to three theologians. Tillich elaborated an accommodation of secular thought, in heralding Jesus as the exemplar of self realization. Barth elaborates rejection in asserting that the secular project is doomed because we cannot overcome the bias of our imperfect and fallen perceptions – we require the aid of an eternal, all-loving God. Finally, Niebuhr saw secularism as a prism which could be used to refine our understanding of Biblical metaphors that reveal the strength found in a relationship with the Divine Presence.

All of these men were impressively learned Christian scholars, but as I considered their theology, a single image completely demolished their relevance: the image of a mother nursing a child. I can see where the difficulty arises: Jesus commands “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” with the prequel somehow elided: “As God seeks to love you…” Thus the image of the bond between the nursing mother and child. A bond of complete trust: unconditional donation of the mother’s self, and from the infant unguarded gratitude for the gift of sustenance.

And so it all seems terribly simple to me: the agency of love in our lives is to give us strength. Who in their right mind would ever choose to reject it? Jesus made it clear, not least in the parable of the prodigal son, that no sin is beyond redemption – all we have to do is turn to God for acceptance and receive gratefully the cloak of his authority.

Of course, the commandment continues “Love your neighbor as yourself.” As loving God allows us to receive God’s love, so we should share the love of God with others. In fact, to sin is to deny love to others. The only measure of the degree to which we have received God’s love, then, is the witness of those that we are given to love. When love has worked its way through us, its power flows through us without resistance to serve others. In love, we both facilitate and stand in guard of each other’s perfection.

As I see it, then, the proposition of Christianity in a secular world is: try to be yourself, and then see what happens when you chose instead the mutuality of love. The power that awaits you there is beyond mere human comprehension.

Bronze Age Atheism

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Stephen Colbert, practicing Catholic, missed a fat, slow one over the plate in his interview of acerbic atheist Bill Maher. In response to Stephen’s invitation to return to the Catholic Church, Bill spouts the usual “myths invented by people who didn’t know about germs” critique of the Bible.

Well, Bill, that’s a Bronze-Age mentality all right, but practicing Catholics have a lot more material to draw upon, material that focuses on finding a redeeming human purpose in the amoral universe of the scientist. That material was produced as early as St. Augustine in the fifth century, and includes the writings of others such as St. Thomas Aquinas, Miguel de Unamuno, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Merton.

Bill, you might try reading some of it, and giving us an honest critique of modern Catholicism. No, it’s not always what you’ll find in the homilies on Sunday, but homilies are offered to ensure that everyone, no matter their level of education, walks away with something of value.

A Demonstration of Strength

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The juxtaposition could hardly have been more jarring: after completing today’s post, at morning break the lead story reported the attacks in France. In the worst violence since WW II, in coordinated attacks jihadists murdered as many as 120 people at three separate locations.

The reference to WW II is notable in revealing how much the world has changed. In relative terms, civil war and ISIL’s terrorist opportunism has brought Syrian suffering comparable to that of European populations during WW II. However, where indifference allowed Hitler to spread war across the continent from 1938 to 1944, cautious intervention in support of the rebels coupled with airstrikes and economic isolation has limited the spread of violence from Syria. As a result, to date the net cost to France of its intervention in the Middle East is tens of thousand of times fewer deaths than it suffered in WW II.

The natural response of the French government to these renewed attacks must be heightened scrutiny of Muslim populations, and Islamic authorities in France should be expected to both increase cooperation with security services and publicly condemn extremist activities.

But how do the events in France reflect on my post this morning, obviously an assertion that peace must be our aim?

While I will not participate in physical violence, I am not a pacifist. We fight cancers with surgery and chemotherapy. Both courses of treatment weaken the body. So with our struggle against terrorism, whether state sponsored (as in Syria and Ukraine) or indigenous, we must reduce its virulence by withholding resources and legitimacy from the perpetrators and seek when possible to destroy the mechanisms of its operation.

But there is more than that to the process. We must maintain vigilance in the spiritual domain to ensure that in the course of executing our campaign of violence, we do not become infected by the mentality that sustains self-justification in the mind of the terrorist. My practice extends even further: in manifesting that discipline, we also gain the power to immerse the jihadist in our knowledge of the benefits of peace.

It is this second battle that I have joined, and I am merciless in my own way. The mentality against which I struggle is ancient, and thrives when the actions of specific individuals are characterized as justifying violent prejudice against entire populations. That was the response of the victors to German resolve in WW I, with WW II the inevitable consequence. It is also the response of the jihadist to global inequity in the allocation of wealth and political influence for the benefit of Western populations that do not comprehend the egregious magnitude of our self-indulgence.

As I see it, every military action should be advertised as a failure of the mechanisms of peace, and reported with regret even when it is successful in reducing the threat of violence on tactical and strategic terms. Even more, I would hope that every announcement would be accompanied with a summary of diplomatic efforts to empower peace-loving peoples seeking to reassert control of regions in turmoil.

So in the months and years to come, I pray that the French people recognize the strength reflected in the asymmetrical results of Middle Eastern intervention. This will almost certainly not be the last such experience they will suffer, in a history dating back to attacks in the ’70s and ’80s, and modern access to secure communications almost guarantees that individuals committed to violence will continue to succeed in their aims. In absolute terms, though, the jihadists and their dependents, isolated and starved of resources in their caliphate, suffer far, far worse.

But to reiterate: it is essential, on the spiritual level, to recognize that the attacks reflect the insanity, in the context of modern technology, of the expression of ancient patterns of predation. While that mentality will lash out more and more violently in its attempts to survive the return of Christ, its impotence is revealed in the increasing brevity of the interruptions it can generate in the creative outpourings that emerge from love.

Working the Truth Out

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Among all the proofs of the efficacy of loving, none is more compelling to me than the existence of institutions of learning. I am one of the most favored and grateful recipients of the investment made by others in discovering and sharing the truth.

During my freshman year at UC Berkeley, my dorm roomie was a talented pianist named John Schmay. John would sit down at a piece of music and spin out a million notes in extemporaneous composition that wandered effortlessly across musical genres. He tried to tame the volcano within through meditation at a self-made Buddhist shrine. Inspired by that example, I turned within as well. As the year progressed, through meditation I had a series of conscious transitions, an opening of doors to ever larger realms of truth. I realize now that those transitions were facilitated by others, and reflected a judgment that I would be respectful in my navigation of those halls.

Since leaving the UC system (I worked at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the first eight years of my professional life), I have tried my best to bring the gifts of truth into my work in the commercial world. It is an ongoing struggle. Our hierarchical corporate structure and the legal framework of property rights both support and sustain the exercise of tyranny. This is expressed in a psychology of management prerogatives that extend, in the most aggressive case, to the idea that a supervisor has a right to untrammeled access to the sources of truth in our minds. In my own case, access has been sought through appeals to lust and greed, and when those failed, through raw threat to my survival and the survival of those I love.

Of course, as one that has surrendered fully to Christ, this is all terribly wearisome. I don’t own the truth; I don’t control the truth that flows through me. Having been given the gift of wandering in it, perhaps to a greater degree than anyone now alive, I perceive that remit to be a jewel precious beyond measure, and something that death will not steal from me. It will only interrupt the process of living that allows truth to manifest itself in the world through me.

Paradoxically, upon realizing that none of the afore-mentioned inducements will gain access to the truth that reaches out through me, a subtle psychological shift occurs. Instead of negotiating an exchange of value, the world itself is raised as a threat to the survival of the truth in me. The assertion of authority is not one of merit, but rather a claim of allegiance from one providing protection. Of course, this is always the last resort of the tyrant. When they no longer can command weakness in their subjects, they manufacture enemies without.

What has been essential to me, in working through this resistance, is to recognize that it is not the specific individuals that concern the truth. They are merely attempts to manifest a pattern of relation that has engendered habits of thinking – just as I manifest a pattern of relation (unconditional love) and habits of thinking (a relentless plunging into the veils that hide the truth).

Having exhausted the resistance of ownership, in America the next barrier is the defense industry, the enormously voracious “protector of liberty.”

So last night I awoke to a dream of captivity to Jihadi John, the target of yesterday’s drone strike in Syria. As I was injected into the scenario, I firmly resisted the garb of a victim, instead asserting that I saw this as a demonstration that would undermine the rhetoric of fear. Firmly enmeshed in the illusion of captivity, I shared with the jihadists that I had never finished reading the Qur’an, and asked them to provide me an English translation. With that link established, I offered them the truth as I understood it, opening my heart to reveal the love that I have received, eclipsing in measure any claims of my worth.

In that moment there was a lifting away. Something gave way, an ancient predatory spirit that has roosted in the Middle East.

Gently I asserted to the jihadists, “Isn’t this the goal you desire?” Their affirmation spread throughout the region. I then became one with that spirit that watches the world from outside, gently guiding our hearts, spreading the hope that one day we will stop fearing the consequences of receiving it – foremost being the power that it brings to elaborate wills that are not yet strong enough to resist the self-tyranny that is our self-concern.

And to my countrymen, I then turned to ask, “Did you really believe that the truth needs protection?”

You can run but you can’t hide.

It is that which is.

We were/are/will be that which we were/are/will be.

Beyond Red and White

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Today I finished Sera Beak’s Red Hot and Holy. Up to the last 30 pages, this was the most constructive way that I could deal with it:

I could elucidate the undercurrents of misandry in Sera Beak’s Redvolutionary Theology, but what is essential of my critique of her book is not specific to her dialectic, but instead universal.

Sera has been seduced by spiritual power and comforting logic, but that seduction adheres to a process that has led many people – both men and women – into a similar trap. The trap is the rationalization of personal powerlessness through construction of a historical narrative that liberates the primitive mechanisms of survival. While Sera’s historiography is not overtly incendiary, in contrast to that of a man like Hitler, it carries the same traps: it focuses us on the past rather than liberating us into the realization of a future rooted in trust.

The fundamental cause of Sera’s error (shared by so many others) is to believe that the material circumstances of our existence, currently dominated by the manifestations of human will, are the cause of our suffering. It matters not whether one is Richard Dawkins looking back 7000 years to an era of superstition or Sera Beak looking back 9 million years to the origins of patriarchal dominance. Both critics of the “status quo” fail to recognize that the source of our trouble goes back much further than that, and so they fall into the same trap that many Christian theologians do: laying blame on humanity (or half of humanity) for originating sin.

The wisdom I have to offer is this: it matters not why we are in pain. It matters only whether we can find healing. My experience is that true healing will arise only from a conciliation that melts all dichotomies: man and woman, matter and spirit, science and religion, artifice and nature, animate and inanimate. Why? Because the reason we suffer pain, as Sera recounts, is that we are incomplete. The only way to fill the gaps that distort our personality is to welcome what we are not.

This is what loving is all about. It’s not about healing us individually, because that hope is misplaced. True love, offered unconditionally, heals divisions and creates harmony.

Sera, you need to tell Kali to stop being such a narcissist. It is not about her. It’s about everything.

So then I get to Chapter 20, and Sera turns around and pronounces everything that I’ve written to this point. Her historiography is indeed a projection of a spiritual infection in the Divine Feminine. She recounts accepting and facilitating the destructive suppression of feminine spirituality through a long sequence of lives, much as Saul did to Christians before encountering Christ on the road to Damascus.

The only insights I have to offer at this time, Sera, is this: you are capable of incarnating the Rouge Lady in this place because she sees in this place, at this specific time, the potential to heal her infection through you. Spirit cannot do work on itself, it needs matter to disentangle the twisted threads of personality. It is as Jesus said [NIV Matt. 16:19]:

I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.

I hope that you realize that it is not in spite of men that this work is possible. The Divine Masculine is also making his presence felt, and doing the best that he can to clean his house. It would be beneficial to compare notes. Solidifying the truth of Their manifestation may be possible only through the mutuality of a response to this, the last of the exhortations Jesus delivered with tender compassion to the rulers of his age, as he looked through the centuries of pain their weakness would cause them:

You! Say I am!

Whitenessing the Truth

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My response to Sera Beak’s “Redvolutionary” theology has been pretty passionate, and I’m planning a post on programming to let things cool down. But before I do, I’d like to elaborate the claim that I made yesterday: “There’s so much more for you than that.”

Perhaps the most popular spiritual autobiography at the opening of the 20th century was that of the “little flower”, St. Terese of Lisieux. While I was at first disturbed by Terese’s testimony to desire to die so that she might embrace Christ, I have come to understand that her recorded life was probably a last parting from those that were bound to her in family, in particular her father.

What was she releasing herself into? The answer is given to us in her revelation of a vision: Terese found herself in the company of three veiled women. One of them, Teresa of Avila, was the founder of her penitent order, and a woman who famously experienced an erotically ravishing love from Christ. Teresa parted her veil for the daughter of her grace, and Terese reported being bathed in the purest light. With an embrace, Teresa offered this paean: “Christ is well pleased with you.”

Why do these women hide their light from us? I offer a parable in that regard in Golem. We here on earth are a mixture of grace and corruption, a mix that cannot be sundered easily. When the pure light of truth shines upon us, the corruption must flee or be destroyed. The light is veiled because, as Moses was warned in Exodus, those not prepared to receive it will by destroyed by its power.

With the saints encountered by Terese, so it is with Christ [NIV 2 Peter 3:9]:

The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance.

And so to experience life in the fullness of its beauty. Can you imagine, ladies, what it would be like to have souls passing through the healing cauldron of your womb, not in a brief spasm, but as a steady stream that grows into a mighty river?

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.

[NIV Rev. 22:1-2]

Please follow me here: Eve had her own gifts to tend, and to share them with men was never going to work. You, O woman, were meant to manifest the Tree of Life.

Derevolutionary

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My last two posts (Red, Hot and Holy Part I and Posturing Women) may have seemed to be unrelated. Actually, they represent the working toward the middle of the critical problem of my life.

It reared up again last night as I left Barnes and Noble, where I had been continuing my study of C#. As I walked to the door, a grace-filled young lady came to my attention, and a surge of sexual predation boiled up from deep within me. It took only an instant to beat it down. It wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last. I know where it comes from, and we’re locked in a visceral struggle that threatens the survival of us both.

For the last fifteen years, every time that I engage seriously the thought of entering into an intimate relationship, a powerful female voice at the deepest layers of my consciousness throws women at me, cackling “See, he’s just like other men. All that he wants is sex.” This was a serious problem in my relationship with Jamie Grace, as in dancing with other women, I would place myself in service of their joy. That would work itself gradually into a series of lifts that would terminate with their legs wrapped around me and their yoni pressed against my abdomen. What observers of such scenes failed to report to Jamie Grace was that I immediately drew a line and backed out of the dance.

I have made it through the next twenty-three pages of Sera Beak’s Red, Hot and Holy and now find myself filled with grief and shame. I know that I must continue to slog through the work, and will see it to the end, but what I perceive now is the slow breaking of this grace-filled woman’s will to Mystery.

The battle lines are laid down for all to see in Chapter 11, titled “Red Night of the Soul.” The setting is her “Cosmic Family Therapy.” In this experience, Sera is invited to allow a group of intuitives to model the psychic tensions that have led her into a dark night of the spirit. The stage is set with stand-ins for Sera’s family, but her parents rapidly fade from view. The scene is instead dominated by a pool of blood, into which a man stands on a chair to adopt the posture of the cross. Ultimately, Sera finds herself on the floor, immersed in this pool of blood, curled up in a fetal position. The therapy session breaks off at that point, as Sera offers rather proudly, with this comment from the facilitator: “You’re pretty out there.”

In my book “Love Works”, in setting the stage for the passion that brought Jesus to the cross, I observe that in reading the Gospels, I sense a grim change in Jesus’s attitude towards his ministry with the death of John the Baptist. John was the only man that heralded openly the Savior’s presence, and as a result was jailed by Herod. Herod feared to destroy John, who was beloved by the people. But John continues to proclaim truth in the court, eventually denouncing Herod’s marriage. As is well known, Herod’s wife sends Salome to seduce her father through sensual dance. In the creepy finale, Herod’s lust moves him to offer his daughter anything, and – at her mother’s prompting – she asks for John’s head on a platter.

The women of the Jewish Sisterhood decry the paternalism of their tradition, but the influence of Beak’s “Red” spirituality is seen throughout the Bible. It is in the line of Hebrew inheritance through the mother. It is Leah sending out her sons to slaughter those that submitted to Dinah’s sexual adventurism. It is Judith using sex to defeat Holofernes. (What is it about sexual temptresses and severed heads?) It is in the Book of Esther, devoid of any mention of God, in which the “Whore of Babylon” grasps the knob of the Persian king’s “scepter” and leads her people into the seductions of royal power that culminated in Herodian corruption of the Law.

In the Christian era, it is priestly celibacy, established not on the basis of ambiguous Biblical verse, but because early bishops used their privilege to secure for their wife’s sons the titles of grace and communal lands of the church. It is, against the backdrop of pedophilia in the Catholic Church, a rabbi offering to an interfaith gathering an anecdote in which he observed that if the choice was between ham and sex, he’d chose the second. The proceedings were interrupted by an angry priest, who stood up to offer that he had two hundred wives, and “they all finish my sentences for me.”

It is my arrival at a Jewish home during Yom Kippur to observe a grandfather demanding that his granddaughter recognize her father as “lord and master”, with the adult women smirking in the kitchen as the girl demurred. It is to awaken to the departure of a coven of women, heralded only by the straggling neophyte, gazing upon me lovingly and announcing “So we’ve won.” It is the pastor at Saddleback Church standing up to announce that he “speaks to Jesus every day,” and my discovery, upon discrete investigation, that it was his wife playing the counterfeit. It is the female minister of my church responding to my trauma at being raped painfully in my dreams with the retort “You’d better be careful with that. Being raped physically is an entirely different matter.”

It is to wade in the deep pool of menstrual intimacy with blood, a pool imbued with all the creative joys of maternity, where men enter only through violence.

Yes, only through violence. Only through self-destructive competition.

So what was the response of Christ to this imbalance between the sexes?

To seize the cross with his broken body, smearing it with his own blood. To carry it to the mount and surrender to death, drowning in his own fluids. To do so while proclaiming forgiveness. To do so in love.

After watching me dance at a pagan ceremony, my minister observed to me that there were still a few Shaker women alive. I eventually came across the Shaker hymn “I Danced in the Morning.” These verses resonate powerfully with the scene described by Sera Peak:

I danced on the Sabbath and I cured the lame,
The holy people said it was a shame.
They whipped and they stripped and they hung me on high,
And they left me there on a cross to die.

I danced on a Friday when the sky turned black;
It’s hard to dance with a devil on your back.
They buried my body and they thought I’d gone,
But I am the Dance, and I still go on.

During her therapy session, Sera did not see Christ dancing – not in the flesh. He hung there passively, immersed in the blood that he entered through the gift of his submission to spiritual rape at the hands of violent men. It was his soul that danced, imbued with the spirit of Unconditional Love, lighting the darkness, washing away fear, and becoming so thoroughly enmeshed in the healing of women that, despite the long millennia of rejection, they find themselves unable to envision their separation from him, and so their avatars, Kali among them, turn their will to his seduction.

Dear ladies, dear Sera: there is so much more for you than that. Try to see yourselves as we do.

I cannot, and will not, much as I might enjoy it, submit to your redcidivism.

Red, Hot and Holy, Part I

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In the introduction to Buddha, Deepak Chopra remarks that he had become much closer to Guatama than he was before the writing. I took that on face value, and gained great insight from the book. But when he followed up with Jesus, I could not bring myself to read the book. I mean, really, who was he to explain my avatar to me?

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up Sera Beak’s Red, Hot and Holy: A Heretic’s Love Story. Indeed, the first half of the book has manifested my concerns. Sera projects the myth of feminine victimization onto Christianity, perhaps not being aware that the very power that she celebrates in female erotic experience is that prison that men were trying to cast off through the celebration of a masculine god. Has the pendulum swung too far the other way? I would agree with that argument, but the question then remains: What kind of balance should we be seeking?

Sera divides her book into two parts, the dividing line being her relationship with a spiritual guide named Marion Woodman. The first part of the book charts her exploration of female spirituality and divine manifestations. From her academic study, she reports that Christian female mystics often reported a deep erotic element in their relationship with Christ. (I asked a nun once whether that was why they were called “Brides of Christ”, and she retorted “We don’t say that any more.”) But Sera goes further than that, identifying herself with the Hindu goddess Kali. From that relationship, Sera celebrates a feminine erotic power that goes far beyond sexuality, bringing healing to those that she pours it out upon.

I will not criticize Sera’s celebration, because in many ways I recognize that she is right. While I see the Whore of Revelation as a manifestation of primitive and destructive sexual urges that originated in ancient eras predating humanity (See the opening chapter of Conrad’s White Fang for elaboration), I understand that sex is a gift that men and women can use to bring love into the world. It cannot be suppressed, and so it must be sacralized. For that reason, there is much to honor in Sera’s writing. Just as the Virgin of Guadalupe and the Mormon angel are ancient gods that chose to survive through Christianizing themselves, so Kali attests that “red and hot” erotic experience is an expression of love for humanity.

But it is here that Sera’s myth of feminine victimization becomes a true liability. Human spiritual experience is terribly complex – look at the Hebrews as they struggle against the primitive will to destroy that is manifested in their God. But what Christ, the final manifestation of our exploration of “Good and Evil”, tells us about the journey is that it is our job to remake both earth and heaven. It isn’t all about us – spirits have their issues as well. That they are far more ancient than us means that they can justify, through the gifts they bring, the sense that we should consider it an honor to participate in their manifestation. But it is not an honor – it comes with the responsibility to push back when they express themselves in destructive ways, and so to force them to evolve.

There are incredibly beautiful and erotic passages in Revelation that inform that process. Sera, as a devotee of Elaine Pagels, does not remark upon them. I have celebrated them elsewhere, but this one deserves to be reiterated: it is the scene encountered by John as he enters the hall of the Lord:

Whenever the living creatures give glory, honor and thanks to him who sits on the throne and who lives for ever and ever, the twenty-four elders fall down before him who sits on the throne and worship him who lives for ever and ever.

The “twenty-four elders” are the mightiest and proudest angels of the realm. It is only the celebration of the one on the throne (Unconditional Love, as John tells us elsewhere) by the creatures living on Earth that forces them to lay down their crowns and submit to love’s authority. Sera should not see herself as a protégé of Kali, but as Kali’s mediator – one of a number of human filters that discipline Kali’s expression.

From my understanding of Christianity, this is the wisdom I would offer to Sera: the erotic power of women is the power to bind spirit to matter. That power is sacralized when it is used to bind love to the world around us. I see this view fortified through a throw-away line from the Book of Daniel. In predicting the reign of kings, it is said:

He will show no regard for the gods of his ancestors or for the one desired by women, nor will he regard any god, but will exalt himself above them all.

The “one desired” being Christ. The reason that female mystics in the Christian tradition have an erotic response to Christ is because it only through that intimacy that they can use the power of their wombs to bind to the world the love that was manifested in him.

As Sera reports, that does not occur only through sex, and I have often found myself in recent years beating away (in the wee hours of the morning) sexual attentions from young women by explaining to them that this is something that they can express even while just walking in nature. Sera indeed heralds this power as a critical part of saving the world from the problems that we have created in it.

I hope for further examination of this process in the second half of the book. You see, in buying the book, then, I was hoping that Sera would reveal Mystery so that I could negotiate with this hidden figure. I may have to do that in person at some point.

Christ Comes to Boyle Heights

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Take a risk for love? What do you mean? And end up looking like THAT guy? Bloody and torn, holes pounded in his flesh.

One of the most heart-rending stories I have heard was from Father Doyle, founder of Home-Boy Industries here in LA. One of the risks taken by the workers at Home-Boy is crossing lines to work with people from other gangs. They made a lot of friendships, and began to stand up for each other. Eventually the gangs began to enforce discipline on their own. In this story, a Hispanic man went down a dark alley one night and was beat up. The beating got out of control and ended in murder.

When Father Doyle went to the morgue, he was devastated to find that the man’s skull was completely broken. The head was swelled up to twice its normal volume. Father Doyle was at a loss to understand what could have moved anyone to continue beating someone like that, well after the point of death.

When I heard this story, I had a vision that the assailants had seen a halo around the victim’s head, and terrified of their own fate, had done their best to destroy it.

Talk about your “come to Jesus” moments. They’ll think about that for the rest of their lives, every time the deceased reaches his hand to them from heaven.

For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

NIV Matt. 16:25

For in their sacrifice, just as Ezekiel, they are a physical realization of the sorrow that Christ endures in loving those that chose not to love themselves.

Long lay the world, in sin and error pining,
And then he came, and the soul felt its worth.

-Oh Holy Night

Do you not remember?

This is Power

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in 2002, Time magazine published a cover article that related the scientific consensus regarding the end of the universe. It was a terribly depressing outcome, with iron planets and neutron stars scattered across intergalactic space, all except the matter that was vacuumed up in black holes.

I was going through a really depressed stage of my life, and faced the strong urge to rebel against that outcome. One option was to take the day off from work to lie in bed. The other was to reach for another alternative. It came to me in this way: at the core of almost every galaxy is a super-massive black hole – an “Active Galactic Nucleus.” We know that galaxies are bound together in clusters, and every now and then pass through each other. Over a long enough period of time, it seemed to me that the AGN’s will eventually collide, spewing out the matter they have absorbed to initiate a new cycle of stellar evolution.

Then I thought: “Well, if that’s how stars get made in the end, maybe that’s how they got made to begin with. Maybe stars don’t come first, and then collide to form black holes. Maybe the black holes are made first, and the quasars we see in the earliest age of the universe are the signature of the light and matter created in that process.”

Scripture offers us three kinds of wisdom:

  • Regulation, the accumulated wisdom of what does and does not work in relationships.
  • Situational ethics, describing how the Divine presence led our ancestors out of trouble when they made mistakes.
  • Meaning, revealing the evolutionary process that provides understanding to guide our investments in the future.

When I look at the situation in Congress today, I see a terrible perversion of this process. I see:

  • In our penal code and permissive gun laws, a process that segregates our population into camps based upon fear, undermining relation.
  • A “survival of the fittest” mentality that insists that poverty is a sign of unfitness and wealth a measure of greatness. People that fall ill are consigned to misery, those that cannot master rapidly changing technology are pushed aside in the workplace, and those that do not subscribe to predatory management practices are ostracized.
  • The unchecked politics of terrorism, where those that resist the changing future throw legislative Molotov cocktails, threatening their opponents with impeachment, harassing civil servants and not-for-profit leaders, and obscuring or simply denying objective truth regarding the consequences of their policies on global climate change, economics, international relations and campaign finance reform.

I would like to be able to corner Rep. Chaffetz to ask, “Mr. Chaffetz, did you ever withdraw during ejaculation? Did you ever avoid sex while your wife was ovulating? If so, then you intentionally prevented the birth of a child. When do you intend to turn yourself in for manslaughter?”

I would like to be able to confront the Biblical literalists with the insight that the whole experience of the nation of Israel from Noah to Jesus was to demonstrate the inefficacy and injustice of fixed systems of laws. The Law of Moses was authorized by God, but it is not “God’s Law” because it condones murder, contrary to the experience of Cain and the teachings of Jesus. The only law that binds a Christian is the law of love, and when you attack and demean those that serve the disadvantaged, you violate that law.

He walked up the sidewalk, his mind whirling with the pattern of creation unfolded from beginning to end. But at the periphery of the beauty were the people that brought him forth but rejected him, and the women that he would serve but that had resolved to force him to comply with convention. Those stains threatened to spread.

In his mind’s eye, a light entered the atmosphere, rushing downwards, clouds rolling away from the super-heated air in its wake. It passed over his shoulder and slammed into the hills ahead, a huge cloud of dust engulfing the spring day that he walked through. In his mind, a great cry of fear arose.

“No. No. I choose that spring day. I choose life.”

Two months later, in the home of a woman that loved him, he found a newspaper open to an inside article that documented that a planet-killer asteroid had passed between the earth and the moon two months before.

That is power. It is power that arises from looking into the things that are wounded and seeing the possibility of their healing. It is to forgo destruction of that which is broken and ugly. It is to serve those that serve, rather than to be a servant to convention.

Rather than seeking glory, it is to be regulated by the sorrows of the world.

All males are created to change things. It is far easier to change things by breaking them that it is to create something new. We indulge the former in boys. It is time for you to be men. If you don’t like tet way the world is, give us concrete and documented demonstrations of what does work.

Otherwise, get out of the way.